Get Inspired – Guest post by Professor Joanne van der Leun

It is an honour for me to welcome Prof. Joanne van der Leun, Dean of Leiden Law School and Professor of Criminology, to my blog. 

Professor Van der Leun joined Leiden University in 2001 and was one of the pioneering staff members of the Criminology BA and MA program at Leiden Law School and has held various managerial positions. She was previously affiliated with Utrecht University (where she also received her MSc.) and Erasmus University (where she also received her PhD). She chairs the RDR (council of Deans of the Law faculties in the Netherlands) and is member of the national SSH council. She is also a member of the Board of EUniWell.

Her post below is full of invaluable insights on legal essay writing, how to get inspired and how to avoid plagiarism. I am sure you will enjoy reading it!

Get Inspired

by Professor Joanne van der Leun

Inspiration is everywhere. This holds true for photography, music and also for academic writing. “Get inspired by what others do or have done” is one of the best pieces of advice I received during my own academic career.

There are many styles of academic writing. Developing your own style in writing legal (or criminological or any other) essays can be difficult. Yet, you don’t always have to find your own path by digging into your own soul or by patiently waiting till you suddenly invent the wheel. Regularly spending time in the library and online to be inspired by examples you like has proven to be very helpful. When I started to write in English (whereas Dutch is my first language) I kept a little journal in which I noted sentences I liked and thought I could use later on. Not to copy them, but to make them my own and to expand my vocabulary. When I wrote my PhD dissertation, I consciously studied the structure of dozens of other theses, in order to find out what I liked and what did not appeal to me.

Whenever I share this advice with students I immediately notice some nervousness. Students tend to be nervous about potential plagiarism. At first this surprised me. Most educational institutions nowadays explain to their students what plagiarism is and how to prevent it. There are codes of conduct, software is widely used to prevent and spot plagiarism. All institutions have sanctions in place which are applied more strictly than years ago. Every student knows this. So why this uneasiness?

It may be the case that you start copy-and-pasting because you are under pressure as a result of bad planning (this is what many professors think). But I think if you are afraid of plagiarizing unintendedly something else is going on. It seems more likely that you believe you have to reproduce the knowledge of others, the so-called experts, when writing essays. They seem to know everything and you just seem to be struggling, even when you know the citation rules.

What is plagiarism? Most people agree that plagiarism is a form of theft that has to do with not paying enough respect to the work of others. Still, there is a lack of a universally accepted definition and concrete cases can be difficult to judge. Ellis et al. (2018:1) define plagiarism as the practice of “presenting someone else’s words and/or ideas as your own without appropriate attribution.” Maybe some students, especially when they start writing essays, do not thoroughly understand why it is fine to be inspired by the structure of sentences and even whole manuscripts whereas you run into trouble if you copy & paste ideas of others without the right citations. And maybe professors think too quickly that students know the rules and therefore are able to obey them.

Over the years, I have come to think that the real issue is often a lack of insight into how to write without relying too much on the experts. Once you are confident enough about your own writing, and when you realize that your own reasoning is what matters to your essay, your worries about plagiarism will probably fade.

How to get there? The best way to become more confident is to be aware of the culture and craft of academic (legal) writing. You can develop this by reading in a very different way. If you are now primarily looking for the knowledge that others present in books, articles and case law, I would invite you to (also) look at the literature and secondary sources as a tool to improve your own writing skills. Consciously try to understand what the authors have done in terms of writing and rhetoric, what you like about it and not. Improve your skills by rewriting - in your own style - what you have learned and how your thoughts develop.

The cliché is true: writing is like a muscle. You have to exercise this muscle regularly to develop it and keep it in shape. But you also have to understand and feel which muscle you are training. As long as you truly remember you are exercising this muscle in order to express your own ideas, observations and conclusions, you will start to rely more on your own skills and realize you are not writing to reproduce what others say. Be confident enough to get inspired.